Supper club’s ex-workers seek memorial on site

Ideas and funding for the memorial are being worked on, a former employee said.

SOUTHGATE, Ky. (AP) — Two former employees of the Beverly Hills Supper Club are hoping to use bricks from the building to create a memorial to the 165 people who died in the fire 30 years ago.

Wayne Dammert, a banquet captain at the supper club for 20 years, and Dave Brock, who worked as a bus boy, are trying to get permission from the owner of the South Hill Medical Center to build a memorial near the hill where the supper club once stood.

“We already had this idea years ago,” said Dammert, of Alexandria. “This memorial is going to have actual stuff right from the site. We found a beautiful ornamental piece back in the garden. It is all rusted and beat up.”

The owner of the 80-acre supper club property has not given permission to build a memorial there. But property managers at South Hill Medical Center have said they may be willing to have the memorial on the property at the bottom of the hill, said Brock, who lives in Independence.

The Beverly Hills Supper Club caught fire May 28, 1977, on a night when an estimated 2,800 people were inside for a show by entertainer John Davidson. The building had no fire alarms and did not have an automatic sprinkler system, now regarded as a common fail-safe in public buildings and required in many areas.

A historical marker at the bottom of the club’s abandoned driveway was unveiled in October. Brock said a permanent memorial to the victims of the blaze would help the survivors and families.

“It puts closure on a lot of things,” Brock said. “We have been looking at the site for the past 30 years. The place has been sitting empty. No one has allowed anything up on the site. It will be nice to do something for the families.”

Dammert said ideas and funding for the memorial are still in the works.

Leslie Henry was 18 years old when her mother, a cocktail waitress in the Cabaret Room, was killed in the fire. She wants to see some kind of marker at the site.

“I was so young. I was only 18 when she died,” Henry said. “My children never got to meet her. It was a part of history. It would be nice to have some place for them to visit. It would be closure for me.”